Mexico rejects UN charge of enforced disappearance impunity

 Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador on Wednesday rejected appraisal from a United Nations committee that urged the country to fight systemic impunity in the face of forceful disappearances.

“No international organization is going to put us in the dock if we are acting legally, humanely — if we do not allow corruption or impunity,” Lopez Obrador told media .

“Organized crime has become a primary perpetrator of disappearance in Mexico, with varied degrees of collaboration, acceptance, or omission by public personnel,” the UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances concluded Tuesday.

It urged Mexico to act immediately to address an “alarming trend of rising enforced disappearances” facilitated by “almost absolute impunity,” a UN statement said, noting that fewer than six percent of cases had resulted in prosecutions.

While men between 15 and 40 years old are most affected, disappearances of boys and girls from the age of 12, as well as of adolescents and women, are increasing, the committee said.

The number of people listed as missing in Mexico stands at nearly 99,000, according to a national register.

Lopez Obrador also dismissed the commission’s call to demilitarize security tasks in the Latin American country.

The UN delegates “do not have, with all due respect, all the information,” he said.

“It’s not like before when the army was used to suppress or finish off the wounded,” Lopez Obrador added.

Disappearances began during the so-called “dirty war” waged by Mexican authorities against revolutionary movements in the 1960s and 1980s.

With rising drug-related violence in the 2000s, the number of individuals missing continued to rise, especially after then-President Felipe Calderon launched a military offensive against the cartels in 2006.